Science Buddies: "Ask an Expert"

I have been given an assignment by my teacher to come up with an experiment to do with mass. My idea was to take a piece of paper and crumble it up into a ball...the idea being the paper has the same mass whether it is flat or wrinkled.

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Hi stevemo,

I would suggest that using the Topic Selection Wizard:

http://www.sciencebuddies.com/mentoring ... _guest.php

or perphaps doing a google search using the words science fair project and mass.

You may want to expand your idea and investigate the affect of mass on some property of an object. For example, how does that mass of an object affect the distance it will move or the speed at which it will move?

Just a thought. Hope this gives you some ideas. Good luck!

Mary

Hi Stevemo,

You're on the right track with how you are thinking about mass! I'm wondering though if maybe this is too simple of an experiment, depending on your grade level. Is your experiment a science fair project?

Maybe you could test how the mass of an object affects effects some other property, like its velocity. Here's just one example studying mass, I'm sure you can think of others:

http://www.selah.k12.wa.us/SOAR/SciProj ... eH.html#re

As you further develop your ideas, keep posting them on this site, and we can give you more feedback.

Just keep in mind the basic components of a good science experiment (http://www.sciencebuddies.com/mentoring ... thod.shtml). Your project should have a independent variable (something you change), a dependent variable (what you measure happening), a hypothesis (your predition on what will happen to the dependent variable when you change the independent variable), and controlled variables (the things that stay the same all during the experiment). Another piece of advice is to repeat the experiment three times, to make sure your results are consistent.

Jennifer